Ask any Harvard student where they get their campus news and gossip and you’ll find a clear consensus for the source of information. It’s called Sidechat.
The anonymous, college-only app arrived on campus in 2022 and has remained among the top four most used social media sites for Harvard students for the past three years—beating out apps like TikTok and Snapchat, according to the Crimson’s annual senior survey. The survey also found that at least half of undergraduates are active on the app. Its effects on campus life are palpable: when internet personality “IShowSpeed” made a surprise visit to Harvard in September, his presence was documented live not only on his own YouTube channel but also via a flurry of Sidechat posts. Soon, both diehard fans and students who’d simply seen the frantic stream of posts were congregating en masse outside a final club where the YouTube streamer had stopped. With hundreds chanting his name and blocking traffic, the streamer’s security had to push onlookers out of the way to evacuate him safely.
I initially heard about Sidechat as a first-year student, when a classmate mentioned it at an orientation event. At the time, I rolled my eyes. On the app, run by the company Flower Ave Inc, colleges have their own internal feeds that are only accessible to students with school-issued email addresses. I thought it sounded like The Social Network, and I wanted no part in it. But during those first days of the semester, walking past tables of Sidechat student ambassadors offering cookies to anyone who had the app, I began to wonder if I was missing out.
I gave into my curiosity after a few stubborn weeks. After downloading the app, I was immediately swept into the College’s stream of collective consciousness—my phone flooded with post upon post of my peers’ anonymous, unfiltered inner dialogue. I had never imagined having so much information about people I likely also knew in person.
On Sidechat, everyone on a college campus is fed the same set of posts, with an upvote-downvote system and comment threads. It’s entirely possible to keep up with every post added to Harvard’s Sidechat: a few thousand college students generate just a few hundred total daily posts, each capped at 255 characters plus an optional photo or link. Without the black box algorithm or bottomless scroll of content that most social media sites have, Sidechat’s limited scope makes it feel like a truly shared space.
Whenever I’m outrageously bored or hoping to get insight into some specific campus phenomenon, I turn to Sidechat. It’s an illuminating way to tap into the campus-wide consciousness and see how other students interpret the world. My peers on Sidechat are brilliant, clever, and unabashedly opinionated, so when I want to figure out how I feel about the national politics playing out on campus—from the spring 2024 Yard encampment to the visa uncertainty for international students—I turn to Sidechat to see the discourse in real time.
Given the speed with which information can travel through the app, it can be especially useful as a source of urgent news. Last spring, when several shots were fired in the T station under Harvard Square, posters on Sidechat warned students of the danger nearly half an hour before any official sources.
Sidechat is teeming with information that has reallife implications, with no means to verify what is true.
But the lack of real social accountability means blatantly false information can also quickly gain traction. Sidechat is teeming with information that has real-life implications, with no means to verify what is true. From claims that former President Barack Obama, J.D. ’91, is attending graduation to purported ICE sightings on campus to allegations of sexual assault, false or unverified news spreads faster on the app than by word of mouth and can whip campus into a frenzy. Sidechat’s community guidelines claim that moderators will remove “bad-faith posts,” rumors, “false and misleading information,” and student names, but when posts are speculative or peers are discussed using initials and words that rhyme with their names, the site’s moderation simply cannot prevent gossip from spreading like wildfire.
Moreover, this lack of moderation encourages the kind of unfiltered honesty that is counterintuitively harmful to community building. Social pretenses disappear as posters voice extreme politics and taboo opinions, amplifying ideas they’d be unlikely to share in any other context. Nearly a year ago, I jokingly posted a poll asking if I should use AI to write a cover letter for an internship—expecting few responses but hoping for reassurance that my hard work on applications was worthwhile. Instead, 513 students, 82 percent of those who responded to my poll, told me I should use ChatGPT. I was devastated at the realization that my imperfect letters would likely be judged against tidy, artificially boosted submissions from my peers.
Every time I visit the app, I can’t help but speculate about the posters’ real-life proximity. Is a student in one my classes behind this account posting racist jokes? Is a neighbor in my dorm the person messaging me “R u kinky”? Elsewhere on the amorphous internet, I can comfortably dismiss reprehensible anonymous users as “trolls,” with whom I share no social or geographical association. But on Sidechat, where anonymous conversations involve my friends and classmates, it’s impossible to ignore the nearness of every political screed or “Any girls wanna hu tn?” threads. Because it is a Harvard-only site, the platform’s horniness and extremism feel like they’re hiding behind every corner of campus.
“Is everyone just pretending to be happy?” reads a post I noticed on a random night in November.
But Sidechat doesn’t just expose the unsavory mindsets of some of my peers. Perhaps more concerning are the deeply felt anxieties laid bare on the app. It’s not uncommon to find posts expressing lost motivation for coursework, difficulties keeping up with the rat race of student culture, and nihilism about the world at large. “Is everyone just pretending to be happy?” reads a post with 61 upvotes I noticed on a random night in November. “This school is the most exclusionary and isolating place on earth,” reads another, posted four hours later.
Some students experiencing mental health low points seem to turn to Sidechat when they have nowhere else to go. But as a fellow anonymous poster on the app, what can any of us do to respond when someone hints at a crisis or even suicidal ideation?
Over winter break a year ago, I encountered many of these depressive posts. I imagined these students—perhaps at home and away from friends, perhaps spending days on a nearly deserted campus—reaching out for any semblance of connection. I responded to one of them in a direct message, hoping to offer a listening ear.
With our contact limited to anonymous text exchanges, I felt vastly unable to provide comfort or direction. The conversation veered towards subjects I had no experience with and felt disingenuous engaging over. If we had been face-to-face, perhaps we each could have framed our thoughts to lead the conversation to some kind of meaningful conclusion. But it seemed we both were trying to speak to some imagined fellow Harvard student—to that concept of the student body that the app leads us to construct—instead of speaking to the individual (digitally) in front of us. I recommended mental health resources, but it seemed futile when we were struggling to find any kind of rapport.
Despite the presumed intimacy of the app, legitimate connection and social support remain out of reach on Sidechat. It may mediate many staples of college life—gossip, peer-to-peer support, hook-ups—but the app makes all of campus life available for observation and commentary by any student who downloads it. Though we can observe the student body in this shared digital space, no one seems to feel responsible for what happens there.
So, I do my best to hold everything I read on Sidechat at an emotional arm’s length, valuing posts for their entertainment value while constantly questioning their truthfulness. After a day or two of using the app with a mix of delight, fascination, and horror, I’m usually eager to know less about my peers—my tolerance for those complaining about course loads or gleefully mocking other students quickly rubs thin. I often delete it for weeks at a time, only to eventually lament that I’m out of the loop, re-download it, and repeat the cycle.
To me, Sidechat reveals some version of the student body’s collective consciousness, but it cannot capture the nuance—or value—of students as individuals. Being tuned into Sidechat can be fun, but too often I make the mistake of treating the app as the center of campus discourse. Instead, I’d like to hope it is far from the nucleus of Harvard culture, because engagement without responsibility will never truly connect us.
